


looked around enough to know

by thirtysixhudson



Category: 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future - Jon Bois
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:33:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27986220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thirtysixhudson/pseuds/thirtysixhudson
Summary: This is when Manny first falls in love: not quite with football but with running, with speed, with the movement of a man who creates empty space around him, who cannot be stopped.
Relationships: Manuel "Manny" Baez/Nick Navarro
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	looked around enough to know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [woodironbone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodironbone/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, woodboneiron! Thank you for your lovely and generous prompt and for an excuse to write even a little bit about these two (very very fast) idiots.
> 
> Thanks to The Slack for encouragement/writing sprints/being the only good thing about 2020. Title is from the classic Jim Croce song Time in a Bottle because I am a sap.

“You know,” Jenn says, “I’m so glad that we could meet up today. It’s really been too long.”

“Yeah,” Nick says, smiling. “And, you know. Congrats on the coaching gig. We gotta celebrate that, right?”

“Yes! And you know, this is one of - I think it’s gonna be, anyway - one of the most interesting games ever played. I don’t know how much you’ve heard about it.”

“Well, you know,” Nick says. “I don’t really watch a lot of football. Other than the games I’ve watched with you. I mean, I follow your games -”

“It’s okay!” Jenn says, laughing. “I get it. I know it’s not really your thing.” She pauses then, and looks thoughtful. “But this field - it’s really something. It’s gonna be a challenge for us here in San Diego, especially. And it’s why I really wanted to talk to you. I think - it’s gonna be easier to show you the field so that you can see the problem.”

Jenn pulls out her phone, tapping on her screen to open up an app. The phone screen shows a tangle of lines stretched out across the States, and she passes her phone over to Nick so that he can see for himself.

“Zoom in on San Diego,” Jenn says. “Now, look. We’re the only field that doesn’t intersect with another team. This, here, is our closest point to another field. There’s about five miles of desert between us and Boise.

“The commissioner came up with a loophole to keep us in the game. You earn one second of out-of-bounds time for every year a player’s in the game, every year they spend on the field. That’s time we can use to get to another field. At some point, a couple thousand years from now, when we have the time banked, we’re gonna have to make a run for it. And we’re gonna have to be fast. It is literally the only way we can play.”

Nick stares across the table at Jenn, uncertain. “So you want me to help train the players? I can do that, sure - “

“Nick,” Jenn says softly. “I want you on the team. I want you to make the run.”

On September 14, 1991, Manuel Baez is seven years old, and he is attending his first college football game. His father, a graduate student in the English department at San Diego State University, had gotten two tickets from a friend who is presenting for the first time at an out-of-state conference. Their seats are in the student section, and his father lets him have his first tiny sip of beer; the foam lingers on Manny’s upper lip like a moustache until he wipes it off with the back of his hand. The fans around Manny and his father stand for the whole game, and Manny climbs onto the top of the bleacher seat, turning his head back and forth to follow the gaps between the students in front of him so that he can see the field. Manny does not know the rules of the game, but he watches his father and the crowd, and he cheers when they cheer and groans theatrically, hands on his head, when they do not. 

Manny often thinks to himself that it seems impossible to move the ball up the field, that there is no way through the line of bodies between San Diego’s players and the goal. The game stops and starts and Manny can never find the reason for it. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, there is a moment where San Diego’s number 28 dodges and breaks free of a crowd of the opposing team’s players and runs more than half the length of the field to score a touchdown. The students around him scream, deafening.

This is when Manny first falls in love: not quite with football but with running, with speed, with the movement of a man who creates empty space around him, who cannot be stopped. When he closes his eyes that night, he imagines himself on the field, arms pumping, running with nothing between him and the horizon. 

In the thousands and thousands of years still to come in Manuel Baez’s long life, he forgets many of the details of that day - the sound of the crowd, the taste of that first drink of cheap beer - but he never forgets the way that Marshall Faulk’s 61 yard run made him feel: like a door in the universe had come unlocked and shown him something mostly kept secret and hidden. He does not know it yet, but he will spend the rest of his life chasing that feeling. 

Nick and Manny meet for the first time at kickoff. It’s the first time that the team has met, and for many of them - the paper players, the folks who just wanted to see their name on an Elite Series card - it will be the last time they meet. 

The players stand in a mass on the 50 yard line. The scoreboard is showing news from around the country: one hundred and ten teams, over ten thousand players, all dashing out of their stadiums. San Diego’s Channel 7 has a news crew on the sidelines, but they aren’t filming; like everyone else, they’re standing watching the show on the scoreboard. There isn't much to see on their own field, and no one wants to miss the spectacle on the screen.

“It’s like the Amazing Race,” Nick says to Manny standing next to him. Nick does not yet know that Manny is Manny, what Manny will come to mean to him; in the coming years, he will sometimes think about their first conversation and wish that he had talked about anything but a shitty reality TV show that he had not even liked when it had first aired. 

“What?” Manny says. 

“The Amazing Race,” Nick says. “You remember that show? With the teams running around the world and solving clues?”

“Uh, no,” Manny says. “I didn’t really watch that stuff.”

They’re interrupted by Coach, then, who grabs them both by the shoulders in a loose hug. 

“My two guys,” she says, beaming. “I’m so glad you found each other already. Let’s go talk football.”

Coach walks them to her office. To Nick’s surprise, the football - San Diego’s football, the thing that keeps them in the game - is just sitting in the open on her desk.

Manny must share Nick’s concern, because he immediately asks Coach about it. 

“Are you really just gonna leave the football on your desk, Coach? I mean. It feels like we should at least hide it in a locker or something.”

“Well, you know,” Coach says. “It’s gonna be a long time before anyone can try to come get it. And I don’t think that we’re gonna be near the list of another team’s targets anytime soon. We’re nobody; that’s our biggest strength right now. That, and you two.”

This is when Nick really starts to understand what it will take to actually do this: thousands of years of work and waiting to just get off their field, and that’s not even the real goal of this whole thing. Maybe a few thousand more years before he banks enough time to make the run back, hopefully with another team’s ball to show for it. 

Their chance of winning the Bowl is so minuscule as to be non-existent. Their chance of even bringing another football back home has to be only slightly better. It seems impossible. 

“So let’s get started,” Nick says.


End file.
